Voice mail systems provide a convenient way for a calling party to leave a message for an intended recipient who is unavailable to answer an incoming call. Specifically, a conventional voice mail system detects when the intended recipient is busy or unresponsive to the call, and consequently answers the call by playing the intended recipient's audio greeting. Following this, the calling party is prompted to record a voice mail message, which is stored as an audio recording in a voice mailbox associated with the intended recipient.
When the owner of the mailbox (i.e., the intended recipient) wishes to retrieve the contents of the mailbox at a later time, the owner of the mailbox dials into the voice mail system. The voice mail system authenticates the owner of the mailbox, and subsequently allows the owner of the mailbox to navigate through his or her mailbox in order to perform various basic functions, such as playback, deletion and forwarding of individual voice mail messages.
With the decreasing cost of memory, voice mail systems now permit a calling party to leave increasingly lengthy voice mail messages. In view of the large amount of information that can be conveyed in a voice mail message, the owner of the mailbox may desire to do more than merely listen to each message. Instead, the owner of the mailbox may wish to perform a more sophisticated processing function on the contents of one or more voice mail messages. For example, the mailbox owner may wish to use his or her personal digital assistant (PDA) to extract, save and/or distribute specific information conveyed in a given voice mail message. In other cases, the mailbox owner may wish to use his or her desktop computer to transfer the voice mail message to a computer-readable storage medium for archiving.
However, the basic voice mail systems which exist in many of today's businesses do not allow the aforementioned functionality to be achieved. Specifically, conventional voice mail systems do not render voice mail messages electronically processable by mailbox owners using a device of their choice. Rather, mailbox owners who wish to extract information from their voice mail messages are restricted to hastily transcribing their messages on paper while listening to them. Clearly, therefore, a need exists in the industry to alleviate this difficulty, while recognizing that businesses may be reluctant to overhaul their existing voice mail systems.